Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World

In this episode of Visionary, Jason Whittaker is joined by the scholar Jodie Marley, whose work includes a study of W. B. Yeats's reception of Blake in mystical circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this wide-ranging discussion, they look at how Blake was adopted as a mystic and occultist, as well as the important work done by Yeats and his colleague Edwin John Ellis to edit the first collected works of William Blake.

Biographer of the Beats and co-founder of the counter-culture newspaper, International Times, Barry Miles joins Camila Oliveira in conversation about how, through Zapple Records which he set up with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he came to record Allen Ginsberg's settings of the poetry of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In this fascinating discussion, he also reminisces as to how - with Ginsberg and filmmaker Barbara Rubin - he was instrumental in helping to bring about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.

James Keery and Steve Clark begin with a discussion of the ‘song’ performed by ‘Tambourine Man’, which is often regarded as an invitation to Blakean ‘immortal moments’. If ‘the Ruins of Time build Mansions in Eternity’, in Dylan these have become ‘foggy ruins of time’, trading posts on a ‘windy beach’, where black captives may be ‘silhouetted by the sea’. It is also performed within the ‘love and theft’ tradition of blackface minstrelsy: Mr Tambo as a ‘ragged clown’, casting a ‘dancing spell’ upon ‘circus sands’. Race has become a hyper-sensitive issue in recent Blake studies. If Black lives matter, is any representation by a white artist necessarily exploitative; if so, what about Black voices? This talk examines the mid-18th century convergence of British evangelical hymnody with African musical forms, to the extent that one might speak of the negro appropriation of Watts and Wesley. It explores what Blake may have known of this tradition and its influence throughout his work, chart its genealogy through 19th-century blackface minstrelsy, and explore its subsequent exfoliation across 20th century culture. It will conclude by arguing that Blake's prominence in recent popular music (including but not limited to Dylan), usually attributed to celebration of enhanced states of consciousness, is inseparable from his positive ‘Responsing’ to this inheritance.

With its exploration of the unconscious via the dreamscapes of artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali, and a rejection of the kind of excessive rationalism that had boxed European countries into the horrors of the First World War, it would seem that Surrealism and William Blake were a match made in heaven - or a marriage made in hell. In this episode, Jason Whittaker explores some of the ways in which the Surrealists invoked Blake and explored his ideas and his status as a "complete artist" in their own work.

Roger Whitson explores the ways in which Donald Ault and Bruno Latour can provide us with insights into Blake's experiments in visionary physics. This podcast explores the relations between science, art and aesthetics, not only the representation of science in art and photography, but also what the philosopher Latour calls the presentation or arrangement of facts.

Blake scholar David Worrall discusses his latest book, William Blake's Visions, which explores the ways in which what Blake referred to as his visions can be attributed to verifiable perceptual phenomena including visual hallucinations (some probably derived from migraine aura), and auditory and visual hallucinations derived from several types of synaesthesia. None of Blake's conditions were pathological, all of them have a degree of prevalence in modern populations. Blake has been celebrated as a ‘visionary,’ yet his ‘visions’ have been ignored for too long.

Sharon Choe is joined by other Blake scholars - Hannah McAuliffe, Jodie Marley, Jake Elliott and Annise rogers - to discuss the range of talks and papers on William Blake at 2024 British Association of Romanticism Studies conference and consider some of the futures for Blake studies.

William Blake has long been one of the many influences on the style and visuals of director Ridley Scott, most notably in his 2012 Alien: Prometheus, but also other films such as Blade Runner, Legend and Hannibal. In this podcast, Jason Whittaker explores how Ridley has used Blake, with particular emphasis on the Romantic artist's re-reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, which shaped Scott's vision of the Engineers as "dark angels".

When most people think of William Blake, one of the first words they use is visionary. In this podcast, Jason Whittaker explores what that means in relation to Blake, and also how the Romantic artist gave a practical guide in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell on how to become a visionary poet.

William Blake has been claimed by a number of esoteric and even occult thinkers and practitioners. At the end of his life, he was as much known for his series of Visionary Heads - apparitions of spirits and historical figures - and this made him attractive to later spiritualists in the Victorian era. In this podcast, Jason Whittaker explores how Blake was invoked by two more radical practitioners of magic: Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare.

Often hailed as "the Scottish William Blake", Alasdair Gray's love of both the graphic arts and written word does indeed owe much to his admiration for the Romantic poet and engraver. In this talk, originally delivered as part of the Global Blake In Conversation series, Jason Whittaker explores some of the connections between Gray's mythic work and that of Blake, especially in his first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books.

In this episode, Annise Rogers looks at the development of the figure of Samson in Blake's early collection, Poetical Sketches, exploring the connections to John Milton's Samson Agonistes, the violent and disturbing allusions to this hero in the Bible, and how he may have served as an early prototype of Orc and, later, the giant Albion.

Critics have long noted the influence of William Blake on James Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake. What has been understudied, however, is the way Joyce extends Blake's subversive transformation of the epic tradition in his long poems, especially Jerusalem. While Ulysses is typically regarded as Joyce's major engagement with epic literature, Matthew Leporati argues in this podcast that Finnegans Wake more radically engages it by adapting Jerusalem into a postmodern, postcolonial reflection on empire's fragmentation of the world and on the possibility of creating global unity.

Billy Bragg in conversation with Jason Whittaker on the influence of Blake on his life, music and politics, looking also at questions of the hymn Jerusalem and Englishness.

This is taken from a recording originally made for The Blake Society in 2022.

In this episode, Mike Goode considers the ways in which William Blake's famous invocation, "To see a world in a grain of sand" has become a viral meme jumping across different media formats, from poetry anthologies to popular TV shows and even computer viruses. 

This podcast is adapted from a talk originally made to the Global Blake conference in 2022.

In this episode of Visionary: How William Blake changed the world, Jason Whittaker is joined by Sharon Choe, Annise Rogers, and Hannah McAuliffe to discuss one of the darkest works ever created by Blake - The First Book of Urizen. Pubished in 1794, this illuminated book is a satire on the the Book of Genesis that shows a horrific vision of material creation, human sexuality and the body.

In this episode of Visionary: How William Blake changed the world, Jason Whittaker considers the ways in which Blake influenced the writer Angela Carter, in particular her science fiction satire, The Passion of New Eve, a retelling of Milton a Poem and a scathing critique of Blake's ideas of gender and sexuality.

In this episode of Visionary: How William Blake changed the world, Jason Whittaker considers the ways in which the SF author J.G. Ballard rewrote Blake's Milton a Poem in his fantastical novel, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In this episode of Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World, Jason Whittaker, Sharon Choe and Annise Rogers review the exhibition William Blake's Universe on display in early 2024 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, considering some of the highlights of the exhibition and how it seeks to link Blake to contemporary European artists.

This episode of Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World, traces the history of his famous poem beginning with the lines "And did those feet", better known as the hymn Jerusalem. It begins with the circumstances of Blake's composition after his trial for sedition in Felpham, before exploring how the poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry during the First World War.